You can watch an episode of “Lost” where the palm trees are big enough to shade your La-Z-Boy. Or you can watch it so small that the beach looks like a coffee stain.

“24” short episodes on a cellphone. NBA games on your laptop, a month after the fact, for $3.95. “Sin City” during a light-rail commute, on a PlayStation Portable. Every episode of “The Family Guy,” stored on the hard drive of the trusty old PC.

Movies, TV episodes and music videos have gone portable. Time-shifting, room-shifting and device-shifting are here. It’s finally a convergent world, and you – either ecstatic or slightly bewildered – are just living in it.

“It’s already a multiscreen world. We’re not talking about something in the future,” said Chris Rohrs, president of the Television Bureau of Advertising, representing local broadcasters across the nation. “It is extraordinary, the explosion of choice. And it is immobilizing at times.”

Video has jumped the shark, escaping the bonds of cable, dish, disc or cassette. Every media company from AOL to Zenith is scrambling to sign deals with programmers, allowing consumers to find and purchase nearly any form of moving image to play over any device.

Even the definition of a relatively new technology like “on demand” already has transformed under the relentless assault of obsolescence.

“What people want is the ability to watch what they want, when they want to, and where they want,” said Bob Greene, vice president of Starz Entertainment Group and the head of the new Vongo movie-download service. “That is the cultural change. You’ve got to respond. The consumer of tomorrow will have a lot more devices than the consumer of today.”

Exhibit: Nathan Burian, 24, carrying around episodes of “Futurama,” “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy” on his video iPod. Yet he doesn’t have cable TV service, only a high-speed Internet connection.

“I watch them when I’m riding up to the mountains with my friends,” said Burian, a catering manager at Brothers Barbecue. “I plug the sound into the stereo system, and I plug into the car power supply, and the screen is pretty big and bright. Everyone in the car can watch.”

Other favored viewing spots: Airport waiting lounges, doctor’s offices. “Anytime you can think you’ve got nothing to do is when I whip it out,” Burian said.

The latest claims of portability are actually true, unlike the late-1970s “portables” that had awful resolution and could show only what came over the antennae, said Bob Thompson of the Syracuse University Center for the Study of Popular Television.

“There’s a huge variety of stuff you can watch, and that is what’s going to spur this second revolution. And it’s going to be one,” he said. “There’s an enormous appetite for this. It’s bad news for Muzak and workplace productivity.”

The rapid changes also have the potential for further fragmenting “appointment” viewing with family and friends. The teenager doesn’t have to rush homework to watch “American Idol” on the family couch – she can use a TiVo-style device to see it anytime. Dad doesn’t need to watch “Survivor” with the big group, he can download it from Google and CBS for $1.99, commercial-free.

Even “family movie night” changes – those sick of “Dreamer” on the widescreen can look into their laps at “Napoleon Dynamite” on the PSP.

“With all of these abilities to seclude yourself, it breaks down a place for the family to get together,” said Dr. Charles Sophy, medical director for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and a frequent author on adolescent issues. “It wasn’t unheard of that they would talk when they got together in front of the TV. Even just learning about your kids’ likes and dislikes. You lose a lot, and I find that sad.”

Dissipating the “water-cooler” experience is at least as profound, argues Thompson. For 80 years of the 20th century, through films, then radio, then TV, “we assembled the largest consensus audience in the history of the planet,” Thompson said. “For a few hours a day, everybody was consuming the same thing. It may have been silly stuff,” but, he added, mass media also encouraged people to synthesize troubled periods like the civil-rights movement.

“I don’t think we realize yet how we’re going to miss that 20th-century idea of everybody feeding from the same cultural trough at the same time,” he said.

The good news about retreating to our own bubble, countered James Chung of Reach Advisors, a Boston marketing research firm, is that it grows ever easier “to get specialized programming for our own bubble.”

Ads in limbo

Advertisers have worried for a few years now that ad-skipping through TiVo and commercial-free downloads makes it hard to reach consumers. But Burian’s Generation Next example signals red flags to everyone involved in programming.

When video images converge, who says you have to pay retail?

Free versus a fee

Burian found the TV episodes for his iPod through free, and likely illegal, file-sharing devices like LimeWire and BearShare.

Asked if he would ever pay the standard iTunes price of $1.99 for other shows, Burian proved the elusive marketing target.

“I would pay for the newer episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘American Dad.’ Or if they had a special Discovery Channel show on something I wanted,” he said. “If it was pretty high quality and a fast connection, I’d pay a couple of bucks to get a show. But you can usually find them for free, somewhere.”

Such sentiments tend to immobilize the companies that own programs. The Starz Vongo service lets subscribers watch any or all of 800 movies at a time, for $9.99 a month. But the movies disappear from the subscriber’s hard drive when Starz takes them out of rotation.

Starz would be happy to sell the consumer a permanent download of a movie, but the studios that own the titles haven’t yet accepted the idea for fear of further piracy, Greene said.

Another equation not yet solved is the simple matter of time. “Liberating” the screen, Thompson said, means not only putting them anywhere, but also putting them everywhere.

“You will watch more. The amount of time spent in front of a screen with moving pictures will go up,” he said. For example, “if you don’t think people will download stuff and put it onto the seat next to them when they drive, I think you’re wrong.”

The TV Bureau’s Rohrs agrees that most studies show viewing time rising steadily over the years. But imagine all those downloads and recordings accumulating on hard drives across America, he said.

“Where do we grab the time from, to watch what we’ve already recorded? You don’t get issued any more time.”

Michael Booth was a health care & health policy writer at The Denver Post before departing in 2013. He started his journalism career as an assistant foreign editor at The Washington Post before moving with family to Denver and taking a brief stint with the Denver Business Journal. During a 25-year career at The Post, he covered city and state politics, droughts, entertainment and wrote Sunday takeouts, and was part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for breaking news coverage.